Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 39: Listener Stories: Ghost Children, Haunted Campgrounds, and More

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

A ghost who steals, ghostly wailing being heard in the night. These are terrifying stories from listeners. Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content.  Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. We have a monthly newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more.  This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Check out BetterHelp.com/staycurious for 10% off your first month Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaelyn Moore. 

I never believed in ghosts. Until I lived in a haunted housing college. It's 11pm on a Friday, and I'm chatting with a stranger at a bar in Marfa, Texas when he tells me this. The subject of what we did had just come up, so I told him about Heart Starts pounding, honestly a little nervous that he made judge me for having a podcast. Oh, they let anyone have a podcast now. I could already hear the snide remark in my head.

But instead, his eyes go wide. I unlocked something in his memory. He tells me he never believed in ghosts until he thought he experienced a haunting. And then he stopped to see if I would invite him to tell the rest of the story. And this, right here, is my favorite part of making this podcast. It's when I tell strangers about the podcast, and they respond with some bone-chilling tale of something they can't explain. I've had people tell me about shadow people who haunted their hotels, ghostly images of their deceased

loved ones that operate in the darkness, and strange warnings that their grandparents gave right before they died. This stranger proceeded to tell me the following story. A few years ago, he tells me, he lived in a house in Savannah, Georgia during grad school. A big southern Gothic house that he lived in with a few other students. The house had some quirks, like how once a week a group of people would stand outside to look at it for about 10 minutes, and then just continue on walking. That was strange.

But one night, things got a lot stranger. He's sitting on the couch in the living room, chatting with a roommate. It's just them in the big, creaky house when behind a closed door that opened into a long, dark hallway, he hears footsteps. a long, dark hallway, he hears footsteps. Slow, heavy footsteps. The two of them stop talking and listen to the sound of the footsteps coming towards them from the hallway where the bedrooms are. None of their other roommates are home, but the footsteps are getting louder and closer.

And right as they get to the door, they stop. Whoever's in the house is just on the other side of the old wooden door. The guy and his roommate are still paused, waiting for someone to come in. That's when they hear the sound of a hand grab the handle and rattle it. But the door doesn't open. No one comes through. Hello? He calls out, but he's just met with silence.

Finally, the roommate just gets up. That's it. I'm gonna go see who it is. As she opens the door, she's met with an empty, dark hallway. No one was there. He told me he still doesn't know if he believes in ghosts, but he did eventually find out what the group of people who stood outside of the house was. A local ghost tour group.

Apparently, the house was one of the main stops on the weekly Savannah ghost tour. It's stories like this that really get to me. When someone tells me they can't explain what happened, and I can really tell how terrified or confused or excited they are. So that's what I want to share with you today. Stories from listeners about the unexplainable and terrifying, and as always, listener discretion is advised. It's that feeling when the energy and the room shifts, when the air gets sucked out of a moment, and everything starts to feel

wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing, it's when your heart starts pounding. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. Welcome to our community for the Darkly Curious. I'm so happy to have you. Halloween is almost upon us and I cannot wait to see all of your Halloween costumes this year. I'm debating whether or not I should go mainstream and just be Barbie. I do have a perfect replica outfit for 1993's Glitter Hair Barbie.

Don't ask me why. And I might just bust that out. If you're listening to the ad-supported version, thank you. Our sponsors help make the show possible, and if you're over on Patreon, you'll actually have access to ad-free episodes on top of your other perks, like bonus episodes and more. Recently, on Patreon, I gave away a copy of one of my favorite books, Killers of the Flower Moon, and I'm preparing our bonus episode this month on celebrity ghost encounters, so you're not going to want to miss that. You can also get some extra shorter

form content on the show's Instagram and TikTok, both at Heart Starts Pounding. If you're craving more Spooks this Halloween, we also have the Time Keeper, a four-part audio drama, starring Judith Lewis, streaming wherever you get your podcasts. This was a podcast I produced earlier this year about a group of kids who start playing a cursed game. It's a really thrilling and spooky YA tale.

It's a little Stephen King, a little fear street, and a little stranger things. You can listen to the timekeeper wherever you get your podcasts. I also wanna take a moment to shout out my friends at the Psychopedia pod, Tanks and Ahtra, and Investigators later. If you've joined us from hearing

about Heart Starts pounding on their show, welcome, I am so happy that you're here. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Psychopedia, it's a true crime podcast hosted by Tanks Sanatra, who you definitely know from Instagram, an Investigator Slater, who is an actual investigator and works professionally in the true crime space. One thing I love about the show is it's really heavily researched, and also, most importantly, it's very victim focused. I am obsessed with sources and research here if you can't already tell, it's literally what I spend almost all my free time doing, so I have to shout out other shows when I think

they're doing it right. I was just listening to their episode about the neo-natal serial killer who was just caught in the UK, this woman named Lucy Letby, check them out, and if you like them, you should definitely tell them that Heart Starts pounding sent you. And finally, I want to give a shout out to the listener who sent me a photo of Heart Start starts pounding being featured on none other than 24 hour fitness TV. We made it, y'all. We're on the TV at the gym. I can now tell my friends that I've partnered with A24 hour fitness. Honestly though, finding that out was the best part of my week, so thank you.

Alright, let's get right into it. I want to start with a story that was recently sent in from a listener in the military. I have a lot of listeners in the military, and you guys are always telling me about your scary little encounters, and I can never get enough. I mean, it hits a lot of my favorite things. Old, historical, often rundown buildings, but also a sense of conspiracy, like they're not telling us something. It's that feeling I get when I'm on an airplane and I see the flight attendants calling each other on the plane phone.

Like they know something I don't know, and that's terrifying to me. This story comes from Destiny. She writes. So recently I was listening to one of your episodes about military stories. I was in the Air Force for four years, stationed in Montana the whole time. Malmstrom Air Force Base is known for housing nuclear weapons, and they're huge, I mean, huge, missile fields. There's actually documentaries on how haunted the missile fields there is.

It's also got a ton of stories about seeing UFOs. I do have one of those stories, but I'm going to tell you about some spooky ghost ones I have instead. One of the missile alert facilities where we would stay for a week at a time was haunted. Each facility has an underground bunker of sorts where the commissioning officers would sit. These officers have the keys that you would turn to actually launch a nuke. Those and someone else in another area would all have to be initiated to launch. In the 1960s, when the facilities were being built, the underground would be built and dug

out first. So for a period of time, there would just be massive, deep holes in the ground. The story goes, one of the men who was working on building the facility brought his young daughter to work one day. She was supposedly about six or seven years old. The father, not paying attention for only a moment, let his daughter get a little too close to that massive hole and she sadly felt her death.

But the facility was still built. Legend has it, the Missile Alert facility was very haunted by her. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a story about her. People said you could hear her laughing, and she would also steal jewelry right off you. Well, my story is this. I was posted out at the facility one night, and after my shift, I went to lay down to go to sleep. Right before I drifted off, I felt the foot of my bed move, as if someone had sat there.

Unmistakably, someone was sitting there, and I could feel them watching me. Whatever was happening did not feel evil, just curious, so I kept my heart rate calm and told myself to just go to sleep anyway. When I awoke the next day, my wedding ring, which was a set of three rings, was gone. Right off of my finger, I panicked, I turned on the light and tore apart my entire room, looking under the bed, on the bed, shaking out the blankets, lifting up the mattress, looking through my entire bag and the entire room. I looked in the bathroom, the drains and the shared living area. I even went so far as to accuse the group of people

I worked with the night before of stealing it off my finger. I even called my leadership. I was so certain that someone had stolen my wedding rings. I cried. I was heartbroken. But then it hit me. The little girl loves to steal jewelry. I ran to my room, getting on my knees and begging her to give me my wedding rings back. I was crying and pleading. I told her I was

sorry for what happened to her, and I even told her the story of my husband, Deny, and why these rings and him meant so much to me. And then I felt it. A wish of air right past the side of my body. I didn't open my eyes. I just kept saying, please, please, please. Finally I opened my eyes and there sitting right in front of me, and right under the edge of the bed on the floor, were my three wedding rings. Sitting so close to each other, there was no way they could have been there from falling off my hand in my sleep. Not only that, but I had looked under the bed several times.

I said thank you a hundred times before grabbing them and putting them back on my finger. After that, every time I posted to that facility, I could hear her laughing. So faint, it barely registered, but I could hear her. And almost every night, I could feel her sit on the edge of my bed. My heart truly warms at the memory. It's so sad the end she had, but I almost feel like we were friends. Her energy was so pure and lovely, I felt like she was looking over me, protecting me when I was there. I think my theory that every military base, facility, housing unit, you name it, is haunted

still holds true. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a demonic haunting or something evil. Sometimes it's just a little girl that wants your jewelry. But still haunted. But that wasn't the only story that Destiny had for me. No, she had another story, not a haunting, but one that lends itself more to the other feeling I was talking about. The they know something I don't know, and that's really scary feeling. After the break. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp.

So some people in my life have called me a catastrophizer as in whatever the situation is, I will somehow think of the worst case scenario. Oh, I'm taking a flight. What if it falls out of this guy? Oh, I'm going on vacation. Well, what happens if it rains the entire time? I thought that this was normal. Like? I thought that this was normal,

like I thought that this was just how I was until I started going to therapy, and I was told that this is actually a not very helpful thinking pattern that I can change. I guess it never occurred to me that I didn't have to constantly be preparing for the worst. Some people are just able to live their lives, not stressing out that much apparently. And since I've learned that I have used therapy for a lot of my adult life, one of the best ways to utilize therapy, at least I've found, is online. Because I can customize it to my schedule, and more importantly, I can wear sweatpants and lay in my bed, which is what I want to be doing when talking through hard stuff.

Enter Better Help, a therapy service that's entirely online. So you can also make it work for your schedule. You just fill out their brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists to find the right one for you. Anytime, no additional charge. Make your brain your friend with better help. Visit

betterhelp.com slash stay curious today and get 10% off your first month. That's better help, h-e-l-p.com slash stay curious. So after Destiny told me about her one haunting, she mentioned that she had another terrifying tale from the military that had been told to her. She writes, Okay, so this story was told to me by my squadron chief who had been in the military for 23 years at the time. He told me this story on his very last day in the Air Force. He said to me, I can't tell you everything, but I can't tell you I've had to sign five NDAs in my career. So he was stationed in New Mexico and his flight, which is a

group of people, and him were talking about conspiracies about the base and the surrounding area, when someone brought up the abandoned base or research center that was about 30 minutes away from them. This base was built into a mountain, so from the sky you wouldn't even be able to see it. It was like a long ranch-dial home, but basically a hundred times bigger. Long, built along the mountain, and completely hidden. Now, it's free for people to explore, meaning it's not blocked off, but still it's such a well-kept secret that the public barely even knows about it. So most of the time it's just abandoned. My squadron chief had the idea to take his flight there one time, not a required activity, but just something fun for whoever wanted to join, and they went on an off day, about 20 of them.

He said, upon arrival, he immediately felt very uneasy. It wasn't until later that he discovered why. They explored the dusty iron hallways, finding animal bones and strange rooms that looked like operating rooms in a hospital. The whole building was very similar to a hospital, but more like a mental hospital than one for physical care. They went into one room that was labeled experiment three. This room was huge and round with metal walls, floors, and ceilings. The only thing in the room was a human-sized hole in the center. They approached it. At the bottom of the hole, about 30 feet down, was a chair,

with empty shackles attached at the feet and arms. I asked him, just a normal-sized chair? Yeah, he said, just a normal wooden chair, and then he went on. Right before the opening of the hole, there was a sort of plaque with the words, feeding room. That was all. He said, what do you make of that? What do you make of that? I was shocked, jaw on the floor. Unfortunately, there's no explanation, just a lot of unanswered questions. He also told me there were long tubes with sort of pods in them to fit a few humans each. They were labeled escape pods. What were they hiding?

What were they feeding? And why did they have to have escape pods? I forgot to mention that also this base was known to the few people outside the inner circle and the workers as a research lab for creating paint that would make any aircraft invisible to the naked eye and to aircraft scanners. So they were saying the paint was toxic and people needed to stay far away. But what were they really doing in there that they wanted to keep people away from.

I have not stopped thinking about that question since I read this story. What were they feeding? I think about it when I lay down at night, I go over it in my head when I'm in the shower. Was that what the animal bones were for? Was the person in the chair being fed or being fed to something else. It's kind of only now that I read it back that I even registered, they were researching

invisible paint so planes could fly around without us seeing them. Side note, I can't wait to tell Leo that there's invisible planes in the sky. I think they're probably gonna have me committed. This next story comes from a listener named Karim, who sent me an email just titled, Something Weird Is Happening in Southern Algeria. That got my brain firing on all cylinders. I could not wait to see what he was talking about,

and he didn't disappoint. Karim writes, My name is Karim, and I'm from Algiers, the capital of Alguria, and I've been a follower, listener, and subscriber of yours for a while now. I've been debating with myself for weeks, whether or not I should contact you and tell you about what I experienced recently. But today, I finally decided to write to you. On September 1st, me and my friend Lena flew to the city of Jeanette in the south of the Algerian desert.

We are members of a non-profit organization and we help the nomads of the Tawarig tribe as much as we can because they're kind of abandoned by our government. This is our final trip of the year and it was to distribute school furniture and money to refurbish a local school. The nomads live in small groups all around the Tassilin-Jer National Park. Me and Lena were assigned to go to a specific group who live in a place called Tadrat Rouge, which is a vast area within the park. There are no roads from the city of Jinnet to Tadraat Rouge, so we had a 4x4 drive us into the desert as close as possible, but we had to finish by foot since we had to climb rocky hills and we had to cross a rocky labyrinth in order to arrive there. A quick note about Tassilina Jer National Park. It's a national park deep in the Saharan Desert known for its large rock formations that seem to appear from nowhere in the vast sea of tan and red sand.

Tisillin-Jer is also known for its 10,000-year-old cave paintings depicting everyday life in the time of hunters and gatherers. Currently, it's inhabited by the Taurag nomads who entered the area in the Middle Ages, but it's been home to humans for 10 millennia, a birthplace of humanity. Okay, back to Karim. At around 5pm, we were at the entrance of the big labyrinth that we had to cross to come out on the other side. We obviously had a guide with us, and he was a pro, so everything was going fine.

We walked for almost an hour while observing the beauty of the nature, as well as the stunning cave paintings that decorate the walls of that region. But we couldn't help but have the feeling of being watched constantly. A little bit before 6.30 pm, we were finally getting to the end of the labyrinth. The sun was starting to set, and we wanted to get to the Nomad camp before it was pitch black.

We exit into a large flat area, and we could see the camp still far away, maybe 15 more minutes of walking. As we're advancing, our guides suddenly change his behavior. He was really chatty and in a good mood throughout the whole trip, but something switched, and it was as if he saw a ghost. Me and Lena didn't think about it that much, but then we both clearly hear an awful whale behind us. We're not sure if it came from inside the labyrinth or from above it.

We were creeped out, but we rationalized it and said it was just an eagle. Much later, after we arrived at the camp, we did the things we had to do and distributed the things we had. It was getting late, and we were setting up our beds inside a little tent that a nomad lady was kind enough to give us for the night. The tent was at the edge of the camp, not in the middle. At around 11pm, we hear the wailing sound again. Lina and I are frozen by fear, but this time it was coming from different directions all at once. It kept going for more than three minutes before it stopped. And when it stopped, we burst out of the tent thinking everyone was going to be out of their tents wondering

what it was. But there was nobody. Everybody was asleep. During the night we heard it again, but we also heard other sounds. Lafs, sounds of traditional musical instruments, the sounds of swords, small explosions, people running and walking, indistinct voices. We kept peaking from the tent and it was always the same thing. Complete darkness, complete emptiness, just the desert. In the morning, the first thing we did was tell our guide about this. He said he had heard stories about this place, but he wasn't sure what to believe. The reason why his mood changed the day before is because he felt the energy change.

And he smelled leather in the air, which is something that his mother told him to keep in mind. She told him that the smell of leather in that area means that those who left are there to visit. When we asked the people of that camp, they said that they knew about these events. They've been hearing them for hundreds of years, and they said that they knew about these events. They've been hearing them for hundreds of years and they simply live with them. One older lady said that it's the spirits of all the people who lost their lives during the French colonization. She said

that sometimes they find messages written in the sand outside their tents in the morning, saying things like, thank you for keeping us company, or please never leave to drought. Was what Karim was hearing echoes of Algeria's violent past? Algeria has had waves of violent invasions throughout history. The French, the Ottomans, even going all the way back to the Romans. A quick story about the Toregs. The French started to occupy that area in 1830, and in 1881, a French soldier named Paul Flatter's led an expedition to explore the area of the Toregs.

But the Toreg people knew what Paul and the French were up to, and they were having none of it. Paul didn't know it, but the Tawregs had been following him and his men for days as they approached their territory, and by the time the 93 men in Flatter's expedition made it to Beer Al-Gamara, an area just south of Tassil, Nigeria, 600 Tawregs were there to ambush them. Flatter's men who survived, which was not many, had to escape into the Sahara on foot, eventually resorting to cannibalism to make it back alive. When France learned about the tragedy, they called for more efforts to colonize the area

and harsher punishments of the Taurag people. It's estimated that around one third of the indigenous Algerian population was killed during the most violent years of the French rule in the mid-1800s. Maybe what Karim was hearing was a reminder. A reminder of exactly why he needed to be in the area giving them aid. Our last story comes from Sapphire Sandalo. Sapphire hosts her own creepy story podcast, Stories with Sapphire, and she has a spooky tale of her own. A time when she was trying to communicate with the dead and may have opened a door she

wasn't expecting. In July of 2020, my grandpa passed away. After he passed, something sort of just changed in me where I thought, I feel like I'm ready to try to actively speak to the dead. Sapphire and her grandfather were incredibly close. and after he passed, she was devastated. She couldn't bear not being able to talk to him ever again, but she had heard that there

could be ways to communicate with him on the other side. And I was like, well, if I can communicate with him in spirit, it'll be like being able to talk to him again. And so I was going really hard on trying to, like, I was literally like, prying my third eye open. To communicate with the other side, Sapphire knew she'd have to become more receptive to the dead. But how do you do that? I did a couple different things. I ordered some, there's like, which is online that you can like, ask them to like, perform spells on you.

So I bought these like, third-eye bracelets. I asked them to like, do you spell in my third eye? I did these energy clearings. I did all these different meditations about oils, like literally everything to try to open my third eye. And then one night, I believe it was like February. It was a full moon. I went to bed and I was having a incredibly hard time

falling asleep, just like tossing and turning, just like, could not fall asleep. When I eventually did, I had this incredibly vivid dream where I was at my grandparents' house, and it looked exactly like their house. It was like as if I was there. And then I walked into the bathroom, and then the bathroom just changed,

like it was no longer their bathroom. and I immediately got this really horrible feeling. I just knew that something very bad had happened. So I'm walking through the bathroom looking around and then I turn the corner and on the floor is this naked woman with long black hair and it's sort of just like spilling out on the ground. In front of her, I just face down, not moving. And the second I see her, I'm like, don't tell me what happened. I don't want to know what happened. And I immediately just like freak out and I'm like super scared.

And I'm like, frantically trying to get out of this bathroom. And I wake up in my bed. So I'm like, lying down. My head is turned this way, like to the right. And then right above me, I hear a woman humming this tune in the room. Like I'm awake, I'm fully awake. And it goes on long enough for me to remember the tune. And that's also how I know this wasn't just my dream, seeping into my waking life, like it went on for a while. Throughout the rest of the night, I'm hearing like tapping on the windows. I'm hearing like distant drumming. And I'm just like, what is happening to me?

My husband is sleeping next to me. And'm laying there wide awake and I'm like, do you hear it? Like, I don't know and he's fast asleep. And then I hear him like kind of adjust himself and then he'll, he lets out this yarn that sounds like the song, the woman hummed. Like, it was like a musical yarn. It was like distinct notes and I'm ever laying there like, like it was like a musical yon, it was like distinct notes and I remember laying there like and it creed the crap out of me and so I lay there oh wait and when the sun comes out I text like all of my friends and I'm just like hey it's a weird thing happened what do you think it was? And so there was like a couple different theories one person said they think that it was So there was like a couple of different theories. One person said they think that it was because I had been doing all these things to like

contact spirits, I became a beacon. And so whoever it was I saw in the dream was a woman who died and she was showing me how she died. And then when I woke up, she was like above me because like she was, that's how she was sharing the image with me. And I was like, oh like oh god that like makes sense but I don't like that and there was like a couple other theories and then someone else said that they think that maybe I was having this nightmare because someone was showing me how they died but then the person in the room might have been one of my guides or my ancestors trying to call me down because I was having such a bad time. And I was like, okay, I like that. Did you ever

try to look up the song? Oh, I know what the song is. Oh, you found out what the song was. Um, so it is the DS E-Ray. It's a very old song. If you like YouTube it, there's all different renditions. It's the opening song of the shining. But the thing is, is that the section she hummed was not a section I had heard before. So I was just like, maybe it's this, and then I like Google it, and then I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is definitely it.

How old is that song? And does it have any like cultural connotation? We might need to fact check this, but I think it's, I want to, Is that song and does it have any cultural connotation? We might need to fact check this, but I think it's, I wanna, because I looked at it recently, I wanna say it as old as the 16th century, pretty old, and I forget,

it's sung during funerals, certain ceremonies, but it's a song heavily associated with death and that transition into death. The song is actually older than what Sapphire remembered. DS-E-Ray is a medieval funeral song written some time in the 1200s, and you've definitely heard it. ["Mufasa Dyes in the Lion King"] It's in the shining, but it also plays when Mufasa dies in the Lion King. It plays when Luke Skywalker realizes his aunt and uncle were killed.

It's become cultural shorthand for devastation, a marker of death, and to hear it being hummed from above your bed in the dead of the night? Well that's terrifying. Well, my dear listeners, thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of Heart Starts Pounding. And sorry so many of you have been tormented by spirits, I guess? I personally love it, so keep the stories coming. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelin Moore, sound design

and mix by Peach Tree Sound. Thank you so much to all of our new patrons, you will be thanked by name in the monthly newsletter. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grace and Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffy. And now, officially, thanks to audio boom. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out Heart Starts curious. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Oh, dude. Are you okay? Did you know that there's invisible planes in the sky? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. They just opened a facility in Australia. Kameline, it is almost 10 o'clock. You cannot call after nine if it is not in a market. Okay, fine. Well, this is really interesting. I've been reading about it for an hour. So, why? Kameline, I think you should go to sleep. Okay, fine.

go to sleep. Okay, fine.